I am a designer and developer and content strategist. I use my experience as a magazine art director and web editor to help publishers, marketers, non-profits and self-branded individuals tell their stories in words and images. I follow all of the technologies that relate to the content business and try to identify the opportunities and pitfalls that these technologies pose. At the same time I am immersed in certain sectors through my content practice and am always looking to find connections between the worlds of neurology, economics, entertainment, travel and mobile technology. I live near the appropriately-scaled metropolis of Portland, Maine, and participate in its innovation economy (more stories at liveworkportland.org. A more complete bio and samples of my design work live at wingandko.com.

HP Tries To Wake Up PC Sales With Infusion Of Leap Motion

Maybe the PC isn’t dead, but sleeping. Worldwide PC sales have dropped 14% in the last year (see chart below), and this has led many to proclaim that the era of the PC is over. Others blame Microsoft‘s Windows 8 for being a radical departure that consumers have avoided by failing to upgrade as they were pavlovianly expected to. Apple is due to release its first quarter earnings next week, and its report on Macintosh sales will either support or debunk the scapegoating of Windows 8.

More plausible to me is the point made by Will Oremus on Slate, that PC sales have slowed because existing PCs are good enough. They are a victim of “unplanned non-obsolescence.”

Dead or otherwise, no one has been harder hit than the world’s largest PC maker, HP, which has suffered an almost 24% decline. In response, perhaps, to this sobering fact, HP announced this morning that it is collaborating with Leap Motion ”to bring 3-D motion control to unique HP devices.” In the short term this agreement will involve the bundling of the soon-to-be released Leap Motion Controller with select HP desktop and laptop products, which will also come pre-loaded with Leap Motion’s Airspace App Store. Down the road, HP will be embedding Leap Motion technology directly in some of its computer products.

Is this a genius move or merely a gimmick? That depends both on how significant consumer adoption of the Leap Motion Controller turns out to be and on what is actually wrong with the PC business. Since pre-orders for the first Leap device will not ship until May 13, and will not be available for sale in Best Buy stores until May 19, it is too soon to say about this first issue, but I have some ideas relevant to the second.

If you look at what has happened in mobile computing, you see that the improvements in hardware have been more than matched with developments on the front-end in terms of user experience, user interface and overall application performance. On the PC side, we see a different story. Improvements in processor speed, memory and screen size in even budget-priced units have far outpaced the quality and quantity of our interactions with them. Apple’s oft-maligned skeuomorphism did not arise because it enabled us to interact with our OSX computers in any particularly innovative way, but because their processors had power to spare, and fancy rendering of realistic textures was a way to make use of that largesse.

Seen from this perspective, perhaps Windows 8 is not radical enough. For all of its wholesale importing of a mobile aesthetic to the desktop, it does not really enable any new kind of interaction with our computers. Design is not just what things look like. As much as I enjoy the flat minimalism of the new Microsoft visual language, it is, unfortunately, just a surface. On a deeper level, design is the process of increasing flow. And this is the biggest difference, so far, between touch-based mobile and click-based desktop devices—the amount of interaction data that flows through them.

This is where Leap Motion come in and where the HP agreement has the potential to have a big impact on the desktop PC experience. By capturing highly detailed gestural information from our hands in front of our computers, Leap Motion enables much more subtle and sophisticated interactions. In a press release accompanying the announcement, Leap Motion co-founder and CEO Michael Buckwald says, “Our focus at Leap Motion is to fundamentally improve how people interact with their devices, and offer as many ways as possible to achieve that vision.” And although Leap Motion’s technology can be implemented in mobile devices, its preliminary focus—and biggest opportunity—is the desktop.

“Customers want to go to the next level when creating and interacting with digital content,” say Ron Coughlin, senior vice president and general manager, Consumer PCs at HP, in the same release. It remains to be seen, of course, what that next level really entails. Leap Motion has had an army of more than 10,000 developers making apps for the device that will be distributed through its Airspace App Store. Through this hands-on beta test period, the company has gotten a ton of information about interaction patterns and problems from these developers and in turn it has used this feedback to improve the product that will ship next month.

I interviewed Michael Zagorsek, VP Product Marketing for Leap Motion yesterday about the significance of the HP announcement. I learned a lot about the Controller’s potential both as a stand-alone device and as embedded technology that I will write up in a forthcoming post. Most relevant to today’s news is that HP’s embrace of Leap Motion’s technology creates a whole new channel through which consumers are introduced to the potential of motion control for their PCs. For developers it means a much larger market for their apps, which will, in turn, encourage more developers to invest their time in the platform. It also indicates that HP is very forward thinking about the “next era of computing when we change how we interact with the computer itself.” Zagorsek contends that it is a “whole new machine, what a computer becomes when you don’t have to touch it.”

HP has not released a roadmap yet of how and when they will implement this technology, but I did find out some general parameters for how it may be embedded in HP devices. Leap Motion is focused on the space in front of the computer for objects and hands to act as new forms of input. The stand-alone Controller itself sits on the desk and faces upwards, but the sensors can be embedded on the vertical surface of a computer monitor or on the horizontal surface of a laptop keyboard. Ithe interaction data can be scaled up or down on an app-by-app basis, so a large screen display could be accommodated as well as a compact laptop. The motion control input can be used at a system level, to control the cursor, for instance, instead of a mouse, but the most satisfying interactions will be through apps native to the Leap Motion.

Leap Motion, as I have written before, is counting on developers to turn the potential of its technology into concrete—and wonderful—user experiences. By partnering with the world’s largets PC maker it is extending its bet on those developers to wake up the PC industry to whole new ideas of what people can do with their computers. If our computing devices are windows into a digital world, motion control lets us go in and grab things and bend them to our will. We become not just passive observers of our screens, but active agents that can reach in and manipulate things directly.

Perhaps the post-PC PC is like the old man in the “bring out your dead” scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Resisting being thrown on a cart of corpses, the very-much-alive grandfather says, “I’m not dead… I think I’ll go for a walk!” Perhaps, thanks to Leap Motion, HP is about to take the old PC for a brisk walk.

Post Your Comment

Post Your Reply

Forbes writers have the ability to call out member comments they find particularly interesting. Called-out comments are highlighted across the Forbes network. You'll be notified if your comment is called out.